How much money did my mobile game make?
Statistics two weeks after the Android release. From ad campaign, to actual number of users and earnings, let’s find out.
Market
Smartphone sales are going up every year. There were 3 200 000 000 users in 2019 and 90% of almost every developed country population, owns a mobile device. We all can’t imagine a day without checking our phones. Often it’s related to gaming. Mobile game market is very big. Averaging, in 2019 games made $ 65 100 000 000 compared to $ 58 450 000 000 in 2018 (link, link). In short, it’s growing quite fast and maybe small developers can also benefit?
The game
I’ve got an idea for simple mobile game for a long time. It’s not perfect, as that’s my first mobile game project. The main goal was to get experience. With my friend’s help, I created Gravity. In the following paragraphs we will focus not on the creation but the results.
In Gravity you need to avoid obstacles and orbit planets. It’s also random and endless. There is only one type of ad, rewarded video when you crash. After watching you can continue flying. All the data were collected during two weeks after the release on Android. Original version (14.04) — was in English with bad logo and without tutorial. Second version (21.04) — after logo redesign, tutorial and polish translation addition. The game was targeted to Poland.
Advertising the game
Besides sharing with my friends (53 clicks), I decided to buy ads on Google. Only $ 23 were spent. Half the money on first, half on second campaign (first and second version of Gravity).
Results are very interesting. Especially the views to actual installations ratio. Only about 1.5% users click on the ad and 0.1% actually download the app. You can see that better logo, results in more downloads. Cost per installation, first campaign — $ 0.62, second — $ 0.37.
Users
Now we will focus on how many people that downloaded the game, actually liked it and played it. The data is from Unity and Google Play statistics. Active installations is the number of users that didn’t uninstall the app. That’s only about 50% of the users that downloaded the game. Next there are daily active users — that’s on average only 10-20% of the downloads number.
On the release day, you can see that daily users number is very high — that’s all my friends. On 17.04 I started the ad campaign. What’s interesting, second version of the game, didn’t resulted in higher active installations ratio. That may suggest, actual game-play is the most important part.
Earnings
So how much money the game made? I spend $ 25 for Google developer account and $ 23 for ads. My total two weeks earnings are $ 0.25. So well, not a fraction of the $ 65 100 000 market.
Impressions is the number of in-game displayed ads, DAU — daily active users. Estimated earnings per 1000 ads views floats around $ 1.89. So to compensate my expenses, there should be about 25 000 ads views. That’s way more than I actually have — 134. So if this trend would be constant, (it won’t as I ended the ad campaign) it would take about 186x more time, that’s 373 weeks (7 years) to compensate. Take this with a pinch of salt of course.
Summary
Was it worth it? In terms of money not at all. It’s really hard to break through so many available games. For sure more money equals better results. That’s why, currently almost only big players in business have voice. But maybe the next game will be better. Gravity’s small, 11.5 hours of playtime, is better than nothing! So keep trying, possibly yours will do better. Even if not, it’s ok, experience is always worth it!
